Madison Review

ign.com:

With an elaborate set of puzzles to solve and no shortage of jolting jump scares to shock you with, unraveling the morbid central mystery of Madison is a bit like trying to evacuate an escape room while simultaneously struggling to prevent the vacuation of your bowels. Taking clear inspiration from Hideo Kojima’s superb 2014 Silent Hill teaser demo, P.T., Madison layers on the clever use of a Polaroid camera for puzzle-solving and exploration with consistently compelling results. It might not be as expertly structured as the spiraling, psychological horror hallways of Kojima’s much revered concept, but Madison’s haunted house is certainly scary enough to be situated somewhere in the same neighborhood.

In Madison you play as Luca, a teenage boy who wakes in his family home covered in blood and haunted by a malignant presence. Luca’s only chance to escape is to puzzle his way through a sequence of increasingly taxing riddles and complete the distressing steps of a demonic ritual, in a structurally unsteady homestead that shifts and recalibrates around him in frequently disorientating ways. It’s a hair-raising residence that I found consistently absorbing to explore, since I could never be sure if the basement I was descending to would suddenly morph into the hellish hallucination of a murder scene, or would merely be a basement that was creepy for… Well, regular creepy basement reasons.

Armed with only a Polaroid camera, Luca’s plight is one that strictly favours flight over fight. Although there are supernatural nasties to encounter at times there’s no real combat to speak of, and instead the only thing that Luca has to battle with is the growing realization that there’s more than a few alarming truths buried amidst the